How to submit poems to a poetry magazine

You’re at a reading, to support a friend. It is not going well. Not your friend, who is quietly stealing … More

How to give a poetry reading

The Little Snoring Poetry Group have written to you asking if you would come and read to them some of … More

You go a talk by a Leading Poet. No one you know is there, but still you sit at the … More

I listened to the most wonderful radio programme about failure the other day. It featured Anne Enright talking with clear-eyed … More

Sometimes I think it’s gone forever -Ken Smith I want to write a poem, Seamus Heaney says, but I have … More

I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you. –Raymond Carver (‘For Tess’) A kind, wise man once … More

To His Lost Lover Now they are no longerany trouble to each other he can turn things over, get down … More

To safe and almost universal silence I published How Far From Here is Home? (Stride) a few days before Christmas in … More

I came across Hubert Moore’s fantastic book of poems The Hearing Room (Shoetstring, 2006) via my friend and neighbour Lawrence Sail. In … More

Readers who have followed my Lifesaving Poems series will know by now that there isn’t and wasn’t a plan about … More

It is odd to speak of missing someone you never met, but this is how I feel about the American … More

I wrote here recently about losing my ambition as a writer. In case readers are in any doubt, the stuff … More

In February, 1999 I was sitting in a car park with Naomi Jaffa when she asked me what I … More

I wrote recently about poets who disappear from view, specifically Susannah Amoore, from Faber’s Poetry Introduction 6. My point is far … More